


From Failing Hands We Throw

by kaasknot



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: All hurt no comfort, Angst, Gen, War Crimes, Wartime Trauma, mercy-killing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25536868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaasknot/pseuds/kaasknot
Summary: Stanniker is an Umbaran fighting against the tyranny of the Republic. In the aftermath of a battle, he meets one of the enemy.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 60





	From Failing Hands We Throw

Stanniker gazed over the field, a grim sort of calm settling over him. Smoke drifted past, rank with the stench of melted plastic, burnt wood, and charred flesh. Little fires littered the pockmarked field—the marks of artillery blasts, glowing like fairy candles in the low light of Umbara’s evening.

They had won this battle. “Won” a ragged stretch of former cropland, the farmers chased away by the advancing enemy line. The 23rd had held the field, had repelled the advancing Republic troops, but the quaint dell that had sheltered the farmer’s house and outbuildings was obliterated. Stanniker’s nerves jangled with leftover amphetamines as he surveyed the damage. He couldn't even tell if it had been worth it.

Bosin, his SiC, ran up to him, bobbing over the uneven terrain, his face lit up like a demon behind the yellow glow of his helmet. He looked like a corpse; his meds ration was probably the only thing keeping him going. “We’re ready to begin clearing the field, sir,” he said.

Stanniker nodded, too tired to muster a proper acknowledgement. After a moment, he said: “There’s no buried ordinance?”

“None save our outer perimeter. We’ve allowed the clones five hours to clear out their dead, as soon as we’ve finished with ours.”

“Very good, Captain. Have Haavi and Noitch Companies cover the northwestern field. Limmer and Vescia can do the southwest.”

“Yes, sir.” Bosin turned and quickmarched toward the temporary HQ, relaying Stanniker’s orders into his wristcomm. 

Silence was deafening, after seventeen straight hours of ferocious combat. Stanniker’s ears rang with the echoes of past explosions, the sound of combat so crisp in his memory that he had to remind himself it was over. The blasterfire had ceased, and now, creeping into the valley like a fog, the moaning began.

A shiver ran down Stanniker’s spine. Blasterfire had started to follow him throughout his days, a constant ratatat in the back of his mind, keeping him on edge; but it was this, the screaming of the injured and the broken sobs of the soon-to-be-dead, that haunted his nights.

He made his way around a stand of trees— _Thalis neurdendrea_ , the still, shocked part of his mind whispered—and searched for the shapes of bodies. The yellow glow of helmet lights, the distinctive scents of shit, blood, and vented amphetamine mist.

There were more than enough. The fighting had been thick, here. Not so bad as in the choke canyons, he understood; rumors claimed the dead there lay five deep on top of each other, mortared by their own blood into a wall the survivors had to climb to reach each other. Not so thick as the choke canyons, but thick enough: Stanniker ran out of painkillers inside of fifteen minutes, and was forced to rifle through the medkits of his troops—his siblings-in-arms—for morphine rations to ease their pain.

“Stay strong, sister,” he said softly to one woman, Corporal Linnea according to her nametape. He tripped her beacon for the medics to find, then squeezed her fingers.

“Did we win?” she asked, her voice wobbling.

“We did,” was all Stanniker trusted himself to say.

She let out a breath and her head sank back against the berm of earth she was resting against. “Thank the Gods.”

Stanniker merely squeezed her uninjured shoulder and carried on.

It seemed years, but eventually the dark kevlar of the Umbarans’ armor gave way increasingly to the white duraplast of the clones’. A few were mobile enough despite their injuries to begin triage and clearing. They weaved like ghosts through the smoke, their skull masks and warpaint calling to mind the monster tales of Stanniker’s youth, of Nosser Tatchki and his army of deathwalkers. Chills crept down his spine, and he found himself jumping at his own shadow as often as he did a clone.

He made his way away from the heart of the battlefield, toward the fringes. The center would be well-searched; along the perimeter, spread out and dispersed, people would die for slipping through the search nets.

There was grass still, here. The wind smelled like sap and gentle phosphorescence when it blew right.

There was no need for an infantry major to comb the battlefield like this. There was paperwork enough to demand his time, all the backlog generated as the higher-ups negotiated the terms of the surrender. Stanniker wasn’t ready to see the battle in stark, emotionless terms, just yet. Some masochistic twist of his psychology drove him to this, to make the fallout of war _real_ , instead of a bloodless, black and white statistic. His counselor said it was his way of confronting and assuaging his survivor’s guilt; Stanniker shrugged at that. So long as he signed off on Stanniker’s fitness papers, the man could say whatever he liked.

“Please,” a voice called out in Basic, cracked and broken, from a nearby thicket. Stanniker shuddered, overcome by almost physical pain at the thought of witnessing another’s, before he turned. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, but the amount of pain on a battlefield either left one numb or a raw nerve. He walked toward the thicket with lead feet.

He stopped dead in his tracks when, upon cresting the lip of an artillery crater, he saw bloody white armor instead of black. For a heartbeat, they just stared at each other.

Then the clone’s injuries registered, and Stanniker felt his eyes widen. The clone, for his part, gave a reedy wail of despair. “Please,” he said again, the voice of a man who knew, one way or another, the end had come.

As if on autopilot, Stanniker approached and knelt beside him. There were other white-armored bodies scattered nearby, he finally noticed. And—white-flecked pieces of meat. They’d been trying to flank Noitch Company, Stanniker guessed; he had a vague recollection of a request for artillery backup in this quadrant, and by the looks of things, it hadn’t ended well for the clones.

This one had taken off his helmet. Stanniker had never seen a clone’s face, before; he looked so young, beneath the blood and dirt. And all the rest of them, they looked the same as this one? An entire army of men who barely looked older than Stanniker’s nephews? It didn’t seem real.

“Please,” the clone said again, though this time it was more of a gasp of pain. His hands clenched spasmodically over his—his torn intestines—“Little Gods, _please_ —!” _Help me_ , he didn’t say, for which Stanniker was pitifully glad. There was no help for injuries like these. He knew it, and he saw the same knowledge in the clone’s eyes. You could see it, sometimes, when a person saw death coming for them. 

This man, though, death wasn’t quite ready for him. He had a long, slow, lingering to suffer, first. Stanniker had seen more ways of mangling a body than he had thought possible, in this war; it looked like this poor bastard’s armor was, in fact, keeping him alive, shattered though it was. Knives in the belly, corks in a bottleneck.

“I don’t want to die,” the clone—boy, really—croaked. “I don’t—I don’t want to _die_ , I don’t—” his voice cracked apart on a sob, which wheezed out in a groan of agony.

Stanniker grabbed one of his hands, their fingers slipping in sticky, half-clotted blood. “Breathe,” he said. “It’ll be alright, just breathe.”

The clone did his best to comply, hissing an unfamiliar breathing pattern through his teeth. Some of the tension eased from his face. “How bad is it?” he finally asked.

Stanniker didn’t let himself look. He had nightmares enough, as it was. “Not good,” he answered gently.

The clone closed his eyes tightly, fear creasing his face. “Will—will I see Shock again?”

“You’re… in shock now,” Stanniker said slowly. “The bloodloss—”

“ _No_ ,” the clone said vehemently. “Not i-injury shock, my _brother_ s-Shock. Will I see my brother again?”

 _Shock was a person’s name?_ Stanniker scanned the… debris around the crater. “Was he in your fireteam?”

The clone nodded jerkily.

Odds were good Shock was in pieces. Stanniker weighed his options. He could lie, it wasn’t like this poor kid would live long enough to learn better, but Stanniker had always hated gentle lies in the face of honesty and a clear understanding of the situation. “I don’t think he made it,” he said, as gently as he could.

The clone made a small, hurt noise that had nothing to do with how his leg wasn’t attached to his torso anymore. His lashes were clumped together with wetness, and as Stanniker watched, two fat tears ran down his temples into his blood-matted hair. One of his ears was bleeding; a ruptured eardrum on top of it all. If he had been that close to the blast, it was a miracle he’d survived at all. 

This man was his enemy, according to their respective leaders. In that moment, Stanniker couldn’t have cared less. “I can help you see him again,” he said, slowly and deliberately, so there would be no mistaking his meaning.

The clone’s breathing, already labored and bubbling, hitched. A terrible hope came into his eyes, one of longing and endless, bottomless fear.

He didn’t answer, so Stanniker continued: “I can trigger this beacon—” he took his own beacon off his belt and held it up so the clone could see, “—and medics will follow it here. They can help you go gently. Or.” Stanniker swallowed. He had offered this for thirty-eight men and women beyond the help of medicine. He had never told a soul; he would have been arrested immediately for war crimes. “Or I can do it for you.”

The clone’s fingers spasmed against his. His breath rushed out in a ragged huff, and he gazed up at the murky Umbaran sky, his eyes roving restlessly, as though looking for something. Stanniker had heard that stars were visible in the night skies of other planets; perhaps the clone was looking for them. Finally, he looked back to Stanniker.

“Don’t leave me,” he said in a small voice. Begged, really, and Stanniker’s heart broke. This was his enemy, but death was the leveler. Stanniker would never say it where his superiors could hear—or even his subordinates, because every army had long ears—but this war was unjust. It almost felt evil. All war was a failure to communicate, but this felt—almost deliberate. The precision with which the opening steps had taken place. The seeming inevitability of the Republic’s advance on Umbara. The immediate and public overreactions of almost every senator, save for a small handful. Stanniker was a soldier, not a politician; all he knew was that he should not be making boys scarcely past twenty choose between painkillers or a blaster to the head.

“I’ll stay right here,” Stanniker said, gripping the clone’s hand tighter. The harsh edge of comedown was beginning to singe his nerve endings, soon he would crash, but he would sooner rip out his own eyes than leave this man to die alone.

“Please,” the clone half-whispered, his voice choked away. More tears tracked down his face. “Make it quick.”

Stanniker did. He unholstered his sidearm, and with no more ceremony than that, placed it as reverently as he could between the clone’s eyes. He paused.

“What’s your name?” he asked, his voice feeling heavy and terrible in his chest.

“Shred,” the clone answered, his voice steady for the first time. He had that look in his eyes, the look of one who was seeing death.

“I won’t forget you, Shred,” Stanniker said. He pulled the trigger.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally this was for a hurt/comfort bingo, but I didn't finish it in time. So here I am posting 2 years later :P
> 
> Title from "In Flanders Fields," because you're supposed to title your meditation on the waste and misery of war after WWI poetry, right?


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